[alnis]

You can definitely make an Action card with the text "You win the game" :-)

Wordbots doesn't have a built-in mechanism to enforce cards being at a "fair" power level. We initially had a few ideas for how to do it: some kind of machine-learning approach to determine how much "energy" a card should cost to play based on its text and stats, or having a server constantly simulating games between AI players with various cards to see how effective cards are in practice, or even a market-based mechanic where cards could be traded for in-game currency and how valuable a given card was would determine it's a "fair" card or not.

All of these approaches were ultimately abandoned as too complicated. Instead, we opted to just prioritize game formats where both players are equally likely to have access to any given card in-game:

  - In the Mash-up format, both players build a deck made up of any cards they want, but the two decks are shuffled together into one big deck that both players draw from.
  - In the Set format, players build their own separate decks but have to choose cards from a given "set" of cards curated by a player (and ostensibly the cards within a set should be roughly balanced).
  - In the draft formats (Set Draft and Everything Draft), both players are drafting from the same pool of crads.

This way, overpowered (and underpowered) cards can still be created by players, but at least in these game formats, both players would be equally likely to draw said overpowered cards.

[digging]

That's clever and elegant, well done. I'm really interested, especially since it turns out to be more than just a ChatGPT front-end.

[jstarfish]

I started making a game like this 7 years ago too. Congrats on your release :)

What I figured was to make there be a cost for using any card, pinned to the number of targets affected, amount of "force" applied, and one or more resources (life, energy, time, space).

Or an equivalent-exchange/extreme-couponing system of some kind. "To destroy the universe, you must first destroy something of equal or greater value." This can deadlock the game though.

After "heat death of the universe" cost too much to play, the workaround ended up being "wait for all other players to die of natural causes" (hadn't implemented time cost yet).

[stonegray]

Could be interesting to see if you can make cards that only one player can use, such as “win the game if this card is played while the seconds of utc time matches the following hmac sum, otherwise lose the game”

Then you’ve got a 1/60th chance of your opponent using it.